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Onions Au Gratin
5 small Spanish onions 4 ounces of grated cheese 2 ounces butter 1 tablespoon of flour 1/4 pint of milk or cream Pepper and salt Use onions as near in size as possible, and pour boiling water on them in a saucepan, and allow to simmer for one hour. Drain them well, and put them into another clean saucepan, and pour the following sauce over: Melt the butter in a saucepan, sprinkle in the flour, stirring all the time, and then add the milk slowly, and let it boil five minutes; add the grated cheese, and seasoning, and pour over the onions; cover closely and cook gently for half an hour. Serve with a little chopped parsley.
A stovetop gratin from the era when "au gratin" meant cheese rather than a browned crust. The whole dish hinges on getting the onions dry before the sauce goes on.
- Drain hardBoiled onions hold a surprising amount of water between their layers. Drain them well in a colander for several minutes, or the sauce will thin during the final half hour.
- 1/4 pint of milkIf the book is British, that is an imperial 1/4 pint, 5 fl oz or a generous 1/2 cup. In American measure it is 1/2 cup exactly. Either reading gives a very thick sauce with 1 tablespoon of flour and 4 oz of cheese, which is the intent.
- An hour is a long simmerWhole Spanish onions of a genuinely small size are tender in 30 to 40 minutes; a full hour will collapse them. Test with a skewer through the centre and stop when it goes in with no resistance.
- Keep the cheese below a simmerHalf an hour of further cooking will make a cheese sauce grainy and oily if it bubbles. Add the cheese off the heat, stir until it melts, and hold the covered pan at the barest tremble.
- Grated cheeseA dry, sharp hard cheese such as Cheddar, Cheshire, or Parmesan suits this sauce. Pre-shredded cheese carries anti-caking starch that makes the sauce chalky; grate it yourself.
- SeasoningSalt, pepper and a little dry mustard or nutmeg in the white sauce keep 4 oz of cheese from tasting flat. Onion water is worth tasting before you discard it — a spoonful loosens the sauce if it stiffens too much.
- If you want a crustThe original never browns the top. Transferring the sauced onions to a shallow dish and giving them five minutes under a hot broiler produces the gratin a modern reader expects, and does not harm the dish.
- YieldFive onions serve five as a side dish, or two to three as a meatless main course. Bread or a plain boiled potato is wanted alongside.
"Au gratin" originally described what formed on the surface and stuck to the dish — from the French gratter, to scrape — and only later came to be shorthand in English for anything sauced with cheese, which is how it is used here, since nothing in these instructions ever browns. Cheese was a common protein stand-in of the period: cookbooks aimed at vegetarians, Lenten cooks and, by the late 1910s, households under wartime meat restriction leaned on cheese sauces, cheese puddings and macaroni cheese to fill the place a joint would have taken. Spanish onions were valued for their size and mildness, being sweeter and larger than the brown onions then sold for everyday cooking.